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The National Library and Information System of Trinidad and Tobago (NALIS) in collaboration with The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization conducted the workshop; Caribbean Digital Libraries and Digital Repositories: Recent Initiatives and Future Development.

The workshop was held at the National Library of Trinidad and Tobago, Port of Spain from July10-13, 2007. It was designed to raise the levels of awareness within relevant institutions associated with the digitization of libraries and archives.
The workshop provided the first Caribbean open forum to the interchange of opinions on digital libraries and archives standardization and harmonization in order to constitute a Caribbean Digital Library Initiative. Additionally, it represented the first sensitization activity for the Caribbean participation in the World Digital Library Project.

To fulfill this mandate the organizers provided participants with knowledge from 17 international presenters who provided a panoramic vision of the state of art on Digital Libraries, Archives and repositories. An understanding of the digitization process, examination of various metadata standards as they relate to digital libraries, and an exploration various open source options for managing digital collections were also gained by the participants.

Notably, several digital library Caribbean experiences were represented at the workshop. They included; the Digital Library of the Caribbean by the Florida International University in the framework of the US Department of Education Technological Initiative and the Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA), El Dorado Digital Library by the University of Colima, Mexico, the Health Virtual Library by BIREME, Pan American Health Organization/ World Health Organization Regional Office, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

In attendance were approximately one hundred (100) Caribbean information institutions and 150 professionals including librarians, archivists, media professionals; staff from cultural institutions, national archives, museums, government ministers and universities in the English and Dutch –speaking Caribbean. The group of experts provided a 100% attendance throughout the four days workshop, an act that attests to the importance and determination of this group to see the Caribbean Digital Library a reality in the region.